There are many situations where a person located at any one of a number of remote locations or sites at a particular facility may desire selected information concerning either the site or something located at the site. Examples of such facilities include historical sites where users may desire information concerning what happened at particular locations of the site, museums, art galleries, and in particular retail sales establishments. Therefore, the following discussion will be with respect to a retail sales application; however, it is to be understood that the invention is in no way limited to such application.
In large retail establishments such as department stores or discount merchandisers, the trend is to control costs by maintaining a minimum staff of salespeople. Since this frequently requires that a single salesperson cover several departments, not only is it difficult for a patron to find a salesperson when they wish to obtain information on a particular product, but frequently the salesperson, when located, is not knowledgeable concerning the products, and may either be unable to answer questions or may provide incorrect information.
A need, therefore, exists for an improved way to provide information to customers on products being offered for sale. Such information might include, for example, features of the product, limitations on where and how the product may be used, warranty information, special promotional packages for the product, and the like. Further, while price may generally be easily provided on a tag at the location where the product is located, price changes are not always updated at the product site, and this may be a particular problem when a product is moved from one location to another.
To accomplish the above, an improved system is required to provide information to customers at product locations concerning the particular product. Such system should be interactive so as to permit the customer to obtain the particular information he is seeking and needs to be asynchronous so that the message for each customer will start when the customer makes the request, while permitting large numbers of messages to be simultaneously presented. Such a system should also be relatively low cost, should be easy for a customer to use, should permit setup by unskilled store personnel and should be easy to update so that new messages may be provided if, for example, there is a change in the price or promotional package for a given product.
In addition to providing information to customers, retail establishments are also interested in collecting information concerning customers to assess effectiveness of advertising and promotional campaigns, to determine shelf space allocation, and for other purposes. By keeping track of how many customers have sought information on a particular product, the business can determine, for example, the effectiveness of a particular advertising or promotional campaign for such product. The ratio of information requests for a particular product to sales of the product also provides valuable information. Therefore, it is desirable that any system for providing information to customers on products also have the facility for collecting archival information on such information requests.
While systems have existed in the prior art for providing selected information at remote sites, such systems have generally been of two types. The first type are off-line systems where a tape, wire or the like containing a prerecorded message is located at the site and plays the prerecorded message in response to a user request. Such systems are not interactive and are difficult to update when information changes.
The second type of system, which has heretofore been used primarily in connection with providing, for example, a price display for a product, involves connecting a display at the remote site to a central computer which may send messages addressed to the site with price update information. Systems of this general type are described in a number of issued patents including U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,002,886; 4,500,880; and 4,766,295. However, such systems are not interactive, do not have the capability of providing a variety of information messages concerning a product to a customer and do not have the capability of generating and maintaining audit trail information on system use. These systems, therefore, do not either address or overcome the various problems described above which exist at retail establishments.
While the problems described above exist primarily at retail establishments, they may also arise at, for example, an art gallery where patrons may wish information concerning the painter, the style of the art work, the content of the work, the history of the work, or the like, while the gallery wishes to collect information on the popularity of various works and on traffic flow patterns at the gallery. As indicated above, similar problems also exist at museums, historic sites, and the like.
It is, therefore, a primary object of this invention to provide an interactive, asynchronous method and apparatus for concurrently providing desired information at a plurality of remote sites, such information preferably being obtained from a central computer. Another object of the invention is to permit the establishment using the system to obtain audit trail information concerning interest in a particular product or site, traffic pattern, and other useful information.